Reading in sunshine

For some reason spring and summer draw me to classic American Literature. I don't yet understand the connection. I annually succumb to it before I recognize it.

My first foray this year is more Steinbeck. How can you not love this?


The Salinas was only a part-time river. The summer sun drove it underground. It was not a fine river at all, but it was the only one we had and so we boasted about it -- how dangerous it was in a wet winter and how dry it was in a dry summer. You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have the more you are required to boast.


"You can boast about anything if it's all you have." That's going on my mirror.

A few pages later the narrator is describing his Irish grandparents:


I don't know what directed his steps toward the Salinas Valley. It was an unlikely place for a man from a green country to come to, but he came about thirty years before the turn of the century and he brought with him his tiny Irish wife, a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken. She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do."


Beautiful...

(quotations from East of Eden)